Just came across Eric Meyer’s Formal Weirdness, which reminded me of some other thoughts I’ve had as of late with regards to forms.

The styling of form elements is challenging using CSS. I keep stumbling over the fact that name is deprecated in xhtml1.0 strict, yet I can’t submit a form without it. I still tend to use dot notation to access form elements, yet use the DOM to access elements outside forms.

These differences have caused me to start thinking of forms as separate entities than the rest of the page, with different access methods (behaviour) and display properties (presentation). In my response to Eric’s post, I mused if this was a result to how the web has evolved:

stage 1: static pages contained information for people to access
stage 2: forms allowed users to interact with the page.

The fact that the two stages are fundamentally different in terms of purpose is illustrated by the fact that screen readers have different ‘modes’ for the two purposes. Now here’s a thought: why are there different modes for non-sighted users? Is there an assumption that sighted users can differentiate them based on visual clues? Is there a reason why we can’t go all willy-nilly, styling things to our heart’s content? Does Safari really have a good reason for squelching our creative flair?

I wonder if the further modularization of XHTML and the adoption of XFORMS will make it increasingly obvious that the rules are different…